Let’s Discuss: Reputation or Experience

(Let’s discuss is a new category of posts with a problem I’d like your help to solve/question to answer/etc. I often try to post what I know/believe to be true, but- let’s be honest- that’s rather limiting. So- help me out- what do you know? Let’s discuss…)

So…

This is kind of twofold, but how do you know/decide what is most important when it comes to people: Their REPUTATION or Your personal EXPERIENCE of them?

So what happens when you have a good relationship with someone and another person you also have a good relationship with has a TERRIBLE experience with that same person? Say… in school, you get along great with a teacher who your friend can’t stand. Or a relative that you get along with but other relatives don’t? And I don’t just mean the totally reasonable “we just don’t click” conflict. I mean, genuine wrong/bad things happened in their interaction that you did not personally experience, but they did. My sister’s father abused me. That is not my sister’s experience of him. So, if I refuse to attend an even where he is present and she is upset?

How do you navigate that?

Even think about faith. A faith I love leaves others cold. Or worse, others have experienced abuse by the faith that saved me.

I gotta’ say, I think it matters.

And here’s the second situation about reputation or experience, what if you hear something bad about a person? How much do you listen? I know it seems like you have to go with your own experience, but at what point do you honor and pay attention to what you’re being told? With my first husband, I was given some information just prior to our wedding that I took as a part of the past (before me) and what he and I were building together, well, that was the future.

Yet…later, that past came to gobble my future with him right up. What if I had just listened- really listened- to what I had been told? If we only go off personal experience, are we setting ourselves by not letting the experience of others’ matter? If we go by what others say, then are we limiting ourselves from new relationships?

It’s like getting a bad reference from a past employer. At what point do you assume people can have a fresh start and what point do you let others’ be your guide and possibly prevent a lot of problems?

So…I’ll pour the drinks, and fill me in. What do you think? Have you experienced something like this in your life? Let’s Discuss!

4 Comments

I think they have to be balanced. I usually give people the benefit of the doubt, and sometimes I find they didn’t quite deserve it. Others times I’ve judged someone on slight acquaintance only to find out later we did have things in common after all. When listening to what others say, I consider who’s saying it as well as what’s being said. Is the person speaking generally reliable? Is he/she speaking from personal experience or reporting hearsay? And is it possible the person being bad-mouthed could cause harm to me or my family if I trust him?
When I met my husband, I didn’t have much opportunity to get to know him in different situations over time. My instincts told me he was a good man, but I relied on the testimony of people who knew him well to assure me that there would be no nasty surprises—with him, “what you see is what you get.” If their response had been different, I probably would have cut bait early on. I know another case, though, where friends of the groom assured the bride he was a good guy and it turned out he had everyone fooled all along. So there’s no magic bullet either way.

Humility is required in dealing with people. We can’t know everything about a person. (We don’t even know everything about ourselves!) We ought to be generous enough to allow people to grow out of their past reputations, but wise enough to take some advice/perspective into account if we trust the person speaking. We should forgive ourselves for making a decision that turned out to be a mistake. And stop whatever trauma we’ve suffered from escalating more by giving ourselves permission to guard against someone who has hurt us if they are not willing to do the hard work of regaining our trust.

It seems to me that your sister should be permitted to have her own experience of her father, and you should be permitted to have yours. Your experiences and perspectives are clearly and understandably distinct. There is no way they would ever be the same.

I think we are (I am!) much too risk-averse. Life is much more zesty when we take some steps of faith instead of trying to plan everything to go exactly right. Instead of being devastated by a wrong turn, let’s be resilient and make a mid-course correction.